It’s easy to understand why women are more accepting of LGBTQ people and especially transgender ppl. For women, it’s socially beneficial to act more masculine. But for men, being seen as more feminine is a social negative. Therefore the idea of male to female transgender people is terrifying and threatening for men in a way that it’s not for women. Obviously this is overly simplistic but overly restrictive gender norms esp for men is a big part of the story of their lack of acceptance for others (bc they first can’t accept themselves).
Since we are just throw something against the wall and see what sticks, I'll join in. Especially if we are psychoanalyzing half of the population. I think young men have been talked down to the last few decades, and they have had enough. As for the trans issue having the biggest difference, try this on for size; men are more inclined to see things in concrete ways. Men have a much harder time recognizing fluidity where none exists. Men recognize facts as stubborn. The facts are these, people can try to change their sex but they will never succeed. It is my opinion, that woman see the suffering of transfolk and are quicker to sooth it. Men see that same suffering and are quicker to point out the root of the problem. We need both, hard heads and soft hearts.
I think your analysis is not overly simplistic, I think it’s wrong. I believe transgender ideology has three main subtypes. The first type is the transgender child which is more of a reflection of his or her parent’s issues. The second is the social contagion aspect of this ideology. This is the pre teen to teenage transgender kids. This group is largely made up of girls wanting to identify as boys because they’re not comfortable in their own gender, especially through puberty. And the third is the true villain of the transgender ideology and that’s the male to female mostly adults. These are the perverse men that want to get into women’s prisons and women’s bathrooms and women’s changing rooms. These men tend to be more sexually perverse and more violent. There are exceptions of course but if I see an older guy that is dressing as a woman I don’t feel threatened but I am concerned for his sanity and I don’t want my wife and daughters around him.
Hi James. I have to ask if you have any personal experience of talking to adult M2F trans folks or if your opinions have been mostly acquired from watching or reading right-of-center media? I've personally known a lot of trans people (both ways) and your description of them as "perverse" and using the cover of being trans to attack women is completely removed from my experience of being around them. If you have any data showing that trans folks are "more sexually perverse and more violent" it would be good if you could share it. Thanks.
I think it has to do with lying. A man is pursuing a female in part to have children. Non-fertile females are not long term partners with whom we can have families. In many cases this is aggressive male sexuality posing as more passive female sexuality, wolves in sheep clothing.
Being female is not a social negative, bearing false witness is.
It stands out to me that all four of the "culture war" issues you've used here are related to gender, sexuality, or reproduction. Do we see these gaps between young men and women on non-gender-related wedge issues like, say, gun control? Immigration? National healthcare?
If not, then this isn't really a left-right thing so much as a dispute between men and women specifically about what "men and women" should mean.
I must say that you almost lost me when you stated, “My aim here is to try and unpack this causal puzzle as much as I can.”
Survey data is correlational not causal, more casual as one of my students remarked during that lecture.
There are remarkable relationships in your analysis that bear pondering as do all gender gaps amongst social measures.
The return of “men” to religion mainly to conservative (fundamentalist? traditionalist?) churches suggests an interpretation of the subservient, obedient wife doctrine being a draw.
Merely one hypothesis among many possibilities, requiring further examination.
There’s a growing body of literature written by women who were raised under fundamentalist, traditionalist practices who are rebelling against that process. These might be women migrating to what we call liberal thinking, more through which to sift.
Last reflection is on the current faux issue of defining who’s a woman. Surveys are typically limited to accepting which box among options are chosen leaving interpretation up to the respondents.
Back in the past century when I was a student of clinical psychology, gender fluidity was known & mostly accepted, considered in diagnoses as a societal factor that might or might not be relevant to the circumstances.
I think a good framing mechanism during any conversation about Transgender people and their freedom to live as they wish is that there are 2.8 million people--1% of the population over 13-- (2.1 million adults, 0.8% of the adult population) that identify as Transgender. This is a very small number of people in the national scheme for anyone to have very strong opinions about. There is no "movement" there are just people trying to live their lives.
I'm very frustrated that no one seems willing to see this as a young women radicalization crisis- the charts I've seen support that view. The belief that the left is entitled to wear down the public on social issues might play a role.
Ryan, I have often wondered why the apostle Paul did not permit women to be pastors or elders, and for years that was confusing to me, but these graphs make me think that he knew something about human nature I didn't recognize. Women are more empathetic, and so they are more willing to compromise on some of these teachings to seem kind to those people in these categories, and men generally are more less empathetic and therefore will not compromise on these tenets. I would wonder if in your research, you see in those denominations where women can be pastors or elders, if the churches move leftward faster than denominations that hold to the teachings of Paul? Causation vs correlation I'm sure would be difficult to know.
Of course there were no opinion polls in the first century AD, but in more recent times (I think before about 1980) women in the US tended to be more conservative than men. The gender gap as it exists now is a fairly recent phenomenon, not something set in long term human nature.
If you look at the four questions that Ryan looks at in this piece. Prior to 1980. I don’t think there would be much debate except perhaps on abortion. transgender ideology was not even a thing. So it’s a little hard to know what women and men from different generations would think regarding these cultural questions however if we classify them as moral questions from a purely Christian standpoint. .Nancy Piercy in her book. The war on toxic masculinity does suggest that during pre-industrialized America then men were more moral than women or at least equally moral. She argues that during the industrial revolution men were taken out of the home and were thus susceptible to secularization and became less moral, and then women were considered the more moral agents in society until recently. Since these questions that Ryan argues are questions of Christian morality not really conservatism in a political sense. So perhaps this gap is not due to empathy as I proposed but perhaps due proximity to liberal ideas. And since more women are in college in grad school now compared to me they are certainly more indoctrinated and liberal ideology? Women also disproportionately, choose humanities to study versus STEM fields which men are drawn to. Which perhaps gets back to a difference in human nature.
“So perhaps this gap is not due to empathy as I proposed”. Imagine arguing against empathy with your full chest meanwhile EVERY war has been ran by men. Men disproportionately perpetrate violence of ALL kinds, but sure women are the problem 🤔 And yes I know NOT all men because I was raised by a decent one, am married to a decent one, and raised two. Empathy IS NOT the problem!
I think you have to look carefully at the four questions that were evaluated. These are abortion, transgender ideology, and two questions about homosexuality. These issues are clearly directly or indirectly forbidden by orthodox biblical teaching so the empathy argument is worth looking at. Questions on other political hot topics like gun control and free markets might poll much differently. My argument is misguided empathy for victims is perhaps more likely in women especially woman without children who are unmarried. Their natural empathy can be twisted to support such causes like free Palestine and transgendered “women” in women’s prisons that ironically are harmful to women.
Fascinating read. While I agree that women tend to identify ideologically with the left, that seems to be a bit of a question begging statement, since the left has those social positions (so naturally the two go together). My question is always *why* does one sex identify with one ideological set more than another.
I'm also intrigued by what is driving the growing divide between *young* men and young women -- it honestly seems to be a shift more with the young men than with the young women.
Hey Ryan. Fascinating as always. I'd like to make a suggestion. You often use adjectives to describe the different between two poll related numbers like "large", "small" and in this issue "chasm". Sometimes a 4-point difference will be "small" and sometimes it will be "huge". I wonder if there's value if having a definition of those terms in your writing? Perhaps something like 1-5 points is "small", 5-10 points is "medium" and >10 points is "large". I know it's narratively useful to be able to emphasise different gaps in different contexts but I think the inconsistency of these terms causes confusion. Keep up the good work!
People do not remain the same age (duh) so a question should be asked: are young men "becoming" more conservative and young women more liberal? Or is the current crop of young people growing up from childhood and adolescence with these attitudes? In other words are individual people changing their minds (as "becoming" implies) or is one generation with somewhat different responses replacing their predecessor as time and generations moves forward.
I think it is due to increased empathy in women compared with men. There are exceptions and it is a bell shaped curve but I think it is the best suggestion that explains this.
This is part of a self-reinforcing cycle, and it's largely driven by the Internet: Each sex encounters the unfiltered thoughts of the other sex in a way people in previous generations didn't, which causes each sex to hate the other sex more, which causes each sex to say meaner things about the other sex on the Internet (or talk about issues in a way that's opaque and repulsive to the other sex), and on and on it goes.
Barring some major changes to the social landscape, marriage is increasingly becoming a pipe dream for a majority of younger Americans. Very bad.
In response to my use is female in this context: there is an essentialism of the biological female from the perspective of the man. The feminine and the masculine are necessary complimentarity, but so is the biological male and female for grounding a marriage. The male sexuality is different from the female, therefore they will have a fundamentally different perceived experience of a trans individual at the biological level.
Some people may find this creepy, but this is worthy of consideration by open-minded people trying to understand there phenomena.
I found this a fascinating posting on the difference in attitudes among men and women toward social issues and religion. The underlying question is of course why. For that I have no answer. Though I have long observed that in a time of rapid change women on the average seem more adaptable than men. Frank Herbert the author if the Dune saga and many other works suggested that we all measure ourselves against an ultimate test which sort of mirrors death and for men that is war and for women pregnancy. He states that even men who never go to war or women who never become pregnant still use these states against which they measure themselves. I am not sure if I agree but it sure gives you something to consider. If Herbert is right about this it might give us a lens to better see what is occurring.
The other thing that drives this is educational attainment. In the last 10-15 years a gap has emerged with young women heading off to college and professional careers with a disproportionate segment of young men underperforming. The political alliances correlate with this as much as anything else. it would be helpful if the graphs could correct for this.
Yes, young women by attending college are getting indoctrinated into more radical leftist ideas, by the increasingly more radical leftists academics. We all know there is minimal acceptance of conservative ideas on campuses. Hence, the divide.
Yeah, all those students who won't even read the syllabus and barely show up to class are being indoctrinated by those super liberal college professors....
I think we're underestimating how social media and tv shows with female and trans leads like Euphoria have contributed to this conversation. It's not as simple as college did this to me.
Most people, even women, in college are not taking "[insert term] Studies" where you will find such radicalism. The ones who do quite likely already lean that way (and maybe their parents do too). Also, most people going to college are not going to the sorts of high profile colleges where you find noted proponents of radical ideas.
It’s easy to understand why women are more accepting of LGBTQ people and especially transgender ppl. For women, it’s socially beneficial to act more masculine. But for men, being seen as more feminine is a social negative. Therefore the idea of male to female transgender people is terrifying and threatening for men in a way that it’s not for women. Obviously this is overly simplistic but overly restrictive gender norms esp for men is a big part of the story of their lack of acceptance for others (bc they first can’t accept themselves).
Since we are just throw something against the wall and see what sticks, I'll join in. Especially if we are psychoanalyzing half of the population. I think young men have been talked down to the last few decades, and they have had enough. As for the trans issue having the biggest difference, try this on for size; men are more inclined to see things in concrete ways. Men have a much harder time recognizing fluidity where none exists. Men recognize facts as stubborn. The facts are these, people can try to change their sex but they will never succeed. It is my opinion, that woman see the suffering of transfolk and are quicker to sooth it. Men see that same suffering and are quicker to point out the root of the problem. We need both, hard heads and soft hearts.
I think your analysis is not overly simplistic, I think it’s wrong. I believe transgender ideology has three main subtypes. The first type is the transgender child which is more of a reflection of his or her parent’s issues. The second is the social contagion aspect of this ideology. This is the pre teen to teenage transgender kids. This group is largely made up of girls wanting to identify as boys because they’re not comfortable in their own gender, especially through puberty. And the third is the true villain of the transgender ideology and that’s the male to female mostly adults. These are the perverse men that want to get into women’s prisons and women’s bathrooms and women’s changing rooms. These men tend to be more sexually perverse and more violent. There are exceptions of course but if I see an older guy that is dressing as a woman I don’t feel threatened but I am concerned for his sanity and I don’t want my wife and daughters around him.
Hi James. I have to ask if you have any personal experience of talking to adult M2F trans folks or if your opinions have been mostly acquired from watching or reading right-of-center media? I've personally known a lot of trans people (both ways) and your description of them as "perverse" and using the cover of being trans to attack women is completely removed from my experience of being around them. If you have any data showing that trans folks are "more sexually perverse and more violent" it would be good if you could share it. Thanks.
I think it has to do with lying. A man is pursuing a female in part to have children. Non-fertile females are not long term partners with whom we can have families. In many cases this is aggressive male sexuality posing as more passive female sexuality, wolves in sheep clothing.
Being female is not a social negative, bearing false witness is.
This is an overtly creepy response. Note the language. A MAN is pursuing a FEMALE (not a woman).
Thank you for always highlighting the take-aways and, for those of us who have tons of daily reading, making this easy to digest.
It stands out to me that all four of the "culture war" issues you've used here are related to gender, sexuality, or reproduction. Do we see these gaps between young men and women on non-gender-related wedge issues like, say, gun control? Immigration? National healthcare?
If not, then this isn't really a left-right thing so much as a dispute between men and women specifically about what "men and women" should mean.
Yes
Another interesting read, with much to unpack.
I must say that you almost lost me when you stated, “My aim here is to try and unpack this causal puzzle as much as I can.”
Survey data is correlational not causal, more casual as one of my students remarked during that lecture.
There are remarkable relationships in your analysis that bear pondering as do all gender gaps amongst social measures.
The return of “men” to religion mainly to conservative (fundamentalist? traditionalist?) churches suggests an interpretation of the subservient, obedient wife doctrine being a draw.
Merely one hypothesis among many possibilities, requiring further examination.
There’s a growing body of literature written by women who were raised under fundamentalist, traditionalist practices who are rebelling against that process. These might be women migrating to what we call liberal thinking, more through which to sift.
Last reflection is on the current faux issue of defining who’s a woman. Surveys are typically limited to accepting which box among options are chosen leaving interpretation up to the respondents.
Back in the past century when I was a student of clinical psychology, gender fluidity was known & mostly accepted, considered in diagnoses as a societal factor that might or might not be relevant to the circumstances.
I think a good framing mechanism during any conversation about Transgender people and their freedom to live as they wish is that there are 2.8 million people--1% of the population over 13-- (2.1 million adults, 0.8% of the adult population) that identify as Transgender. This is a very small number of people in the national scheme for anyone to have very strong opinions about. There is no "movement" there are just people trying to live their lives.
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
This is a common phenomenon, by the way. The average American has zero concept of how many millionaires or Muslims there are in the country.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population
I'm very frustrated that no one seems willing to see this as a young women radicalization crisis- the charts I've seen support that view. The belief that the left is entitled to wear down the public on social issues might play a role.
It might be.
More women are in the university systems than men now, and in all the professional schools. Medicine, law, etc with except exception of STEM fields.
Ryan, I have often wondered why the apostle Paul did not permit women to be pastors or elders, and for years that was confusing to me, but these graphs make me think that he knew something about human nature I didn't recognize. Women are more empathetic, and so they are more willing to compromise on some of these teachings to seem kind to those people in these categories, and men generally are more less empathetic and therefore will not compromise on these tenets. I would wonder if in your research, you see in those denominations where women can be pastors or elders, if the churches move leftward faster than denominations that hold to the teachings of Paul? Causation vs correlation I'm sure would be difficult to know.
Of course there were no opinion polls in the first century AD, but in more recent times (I think before about 1980) women in the US tended to be more conservative than men. The gender gap as it exists now is a fairly recent phenomenon, not something set in long term human nature.
If you look at the four questions that Ryan looks at in this piece. Prior to 1980. I don’t think there would be much debate except perhaps on abortion. transgender ideology was not even a thing. So it’s a little hard to know what women and men from different generations would think regarding these cultural questions however if we classify them as moral questions from a purely Christian standpoint. .Nancy Piercy in her book. The war on toxic masculinity does suggest that during pre-industrialized America then men were more moral than women or at least equally moral. She argues that during the industrial revolution men were taken out of the home and were thus susceptible to secularization and became less moral, and then women were considered the more moral agents in society until recently. Since these questions that Ryan argues are questions of Christian morality not really conservatism in a political sense. So perhaps this gap is not due to empathy as I proposed but perhaps due proximity to liberal ideas. And since more women are in college in grad school now compared to me they are certainly more indoctrinated and liberal ideology? Women also disproportionately, choose humanities to study versus STEM fields which men are drawn to. Which perhaps gets back to a difference in human nature.
“So perhaps this gap is not due to empathy as I proposed”. Imagine arguing against empathy with your full chest meanwhile EVERY war has been ran by men. Men disproportionately perpetrate violence of ALL kinds, but sure women are the problem 🤔 And yes I know NOT all men because I was raised by a decent one, am married to a decent one, and raised two. Empathy IS NOT the problem!
I think you have to look carefully at the four questions that were evaluated. These are abortion, transgender ideology, and two questions about homosexuality. These issues are clearly directly or indirectly forbidden by orthodox biblical teaching so the empathy argument is worth looking at. Questions on other political hot topics like gun control and free markets might poll much differently. My argument is misguided empathy for victims is perhaps more likely in women especially woman without children who are unmarried. Their natural empathy can be twisted to support such causes like free Palestine and transgendered “women” in women’s prisons that ironically are harmful to women.
Fascinating read. While I agree that women tend to identify ideologically with the left, that seems to be a bit of a question begging statement, since the left has those social positions (so naturally the two go together). My question is always *why* does one sex identify with one ideological set more than another.
I'm also intrigued by what is driving the growing divide between *young* men and young women -- it honestly seems to be a shift more with the young men than with the young women.
Thanks for your always interesting posts.
Hey Ryan. Fascinating as always. I'd like to make a suggestion. You often use adjectives to describe the different between two poll related numbers like "large", "small" and in this issue "chasm". Sometimes a 4-point difference will be "small" and sometimes it will be "huge". I wonder if there's value if having a definition of those terms in your writing? Perhaps something like 1-5 points is "small", 5-10 points is "medium" and >10 points is "large". I know it's narratively useful to be able to emphasise different gaps in different contexts but I think the inconsistency of these terms causes confusion. Keep up the good work!
People do not remain the same age (duh) so a question should be asked: are young men "becoming" more conservative and young women more liberal? Or is the current crop of young people growing up from childhood and adolescence with these attitudes? In other words are individual people changing their minds (as "becoming" implies) or is one generation with somewhat different responses replacing their predecessor as time and generations moves forward.
I think it is due to increased empathy in women compared with men. There are exceptions and it is a bell shaped curve but I think it is the best suggestion that explains this.
This is part of a self-reinforcing cycle, and it's largely driven by the Internet: Each sex encounters the unfiltered thoughts of the other sex in a way people in previous generations didn't, which causes each sex to hate the other sex more, which causes each sex to say meaner things about the other sex on the Internet (or talk about issues in a way that's opaque and repulsive to the other sex), and on and on it goes.
Barring some major changes to the social landscape, marriage is increasingly becoming a pipe dream for a majority of younger Americans. Very bad.
In response to my use is female in this context: there is an essentialism of the biological female from the perspective of the man. The feminine and the masculine are necessary complimentarity, but so is the biological male and female for grounding a marriage. The male sexuality is different from the female, therefore they will have a fundamentally different perceived experience of a trans individual at the biological level.
Some people may find this creepy, but this is worthy of consideration by open-minded people trying to understand there phenomena.
I found this a fascinating posting on the difference in attitudes among men and women toward social issues and religion. The underlying question is of course why. For that I have no answer. Though I have long observed that in a time of rapid change women on the average seem more adaptable than men. Frank Herbert the author if the Dune saga and many other works suggested that we all measure ourselves against an ultimate test which sort of mirrors death and for men that is war and for women pregnancy. He states that even men who never go to war or women who never become pregnant still use these states against which they measure themselves. I am not sure if I agree but it sure gives you something to consider. If Herbert is right about this it might give us a lens to better see what is occurring.
The other thing that drives this is educational attainment. In the last 10-15 years a gap has emerged with young women heading off to college and professional careers with a disproportionate segment of young men underperforming. The political alliances correlate with this as much as anything else. it would be helpful if the graphs could correct for this.
Yes, young women by attending college are getting indoctrinated into more radical leftist ideas, by the increasingly more radical leftists academics. We all know there is minimal acceptance of conservative ideas on campuses. Hence, the divide.
Yeah, all those students who won't even read the syllabus and barely show up to class are being indoctrinated by those super liberal college professors....
I guess you don't think very highly of young American women and their ability to attend college 🤷🏼♀️
I think we're underestimating how social media and tv shows with female and trans leads like Euphoria have contributed to this conversation. It's not as simple as college did this to me.
Most people, even women, in college are not taking "[insert term] Studies" where you will find such radicalism. The ones who do quite likely already lean that way (and maybe their parents do too). Also, most people going to college are not going to the sorts of high profile colleges where you find noted proponents of radical ideas.